Goals for the Wikimedia Technology department, for the second quarter of fiscal year 2017–18 (October 2017 – December 2017). The goal owner in each section is the person responsible for coordinating completion of the section, in partnership with the team(s) and relevant stakeholders.

This quarter, the Technology department is orienting its goals to the annual plan programs it is working on, rather than to individual teams. The goal-setting process is described here.

Outcome 4: Wikimedia Cloud Services users can leverage a reliable and public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) product ecosystem for VPS hosting.

Objective 2: Pay down technical debt and allow upgrading of the core OpenStack platform to modern, supported releases by replacing the current network topology layer with OpenStack Neutron, which has become the standard for most OpenStack deployments.

Outcome 1: Becoming a technical contributor to the Wikimedia movement by creating and maintaining 'tools' (bots, webservices, etc) and other innovative solutions is easier than it has been historically because documentation is easier to find, more comprehensive, and descriptive of start to finish steps needed to solve common problems. Cloud Services product users feel comfortable sharing their knowledge with others as part of a community with a culture of sharing via documentation and mutual support.

Objective 1: Collaborate with community to find volunteers willing to form a documentation Special Interest Group to update documentation of existing Cloud Services products

Outcome 1: Becoming a technical contributor to the Wikimedia movement by creating and maintaining 'tools' (bots, webservices, etc) and other innovative solutions is easier than it has been historically because documentation is easier to find, more comprehensive, and descriptive of start to finish steps needed to solve common problems. Cloud Services product users feel comfortable sharing their knowledge with others as part of a community with a culture of sharing via documentation and mutual support.

Objective 2: Create tutorial content for common issues including but not limited to: creating initial account, deploying a functional web service, deploying a functional bot, and running periodic jobs with variations. Where applicable, produce variants for more than one implementation language (e.g. PHP, Python, etc).

Outcome 2: The adoption of Wikimedia technology can be reliably measured.

Objective 1: Design a set of formal KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure the growth and diversity of our technology audience (task T171220)

Conduct structured interviews with team leads in Tech involved in building platforms with an externally-facing audience and get them to articulate who their core audience is, and how to characterize adoption of their platforms. (task T174733)

Research

Tech Management

A: Foundation goal (Community)

B: Serving our audiences
C: Improving our offering

EOQ

In progress

Outcome 3: Value-added vendors who provide services and support based on Wikimedia software and true 'third parties' who install and use software produced by the Wikimedia movement on their own computers are more confident in recommending, deploying, and extending Wikimedia FLOSS projects.

Objective 1: Establish canonical point of contact for third-parties by promoting the existence of a dedicated technical liaison for software projects with support for third-party users

Outcome 3: Value-added vendors who provide services and support based on Wikimedia software and true 'third parties' who install and use software produced by the Wikimedia movement on their own computers are more confident in recommending, deploying, and extending Wikimedia FLOSS projects.

Objective 2: Clarify the Foundation’s short- and long-term commitments to third-party users. Create, publish, and promote a multi-tiered, third-party support level system for Wikimedia software projects. Document the support level of existing FLOSS projects and ensure that the documented levels of support are delivered.

Develop strategy for MediaWiki for 3rd party usage

Initiate a catalog of Wikimedia software projects frequently used by third parties

Create and publish a multi-tiered, third-party support level system for Wikimedia software projects frequently used by third parties

MediaWiki

A: Foundation goal (Community)

B: Serving our audiences

C: Improving our offering

In progress

Outcome 4: The collaboration with research in industry and academics is further scaled and supported.

Objective 1: Provide reliable and available access to Wikimedia database dumps by upgrading the hardware used and consolidating access by internal teams, Cloud Services users, external mirrors, and HTTPS downloaders to the new canonical location.

Objective 2: Complete migration of production database replica access for Cloud services customers to the new high-availability cluster, which uses 'row based' replication technology to provide a more consistent view of production data.

Outcome 1: Members of the Wikimedia movement are able to develop and deploy technical solutions with a reasonable investment of time and resources on the Wikimedia Cloud Services Platform as a Service (PaaS) product.

Objective 2: Migrate Tool Labs account workflows from Wikitech to Striker where they are easier to integrate with the new user onboarding workflow and easier to maintain

Outcome 2: The 'Labs, labs, labs' branding confusion is eliminated. Branding is separated, so that all of these are no longer referred to as just ‘Labs”: infrastructure as a service product, the platform as a service product, the team that manages those products, and the community that uses them to produce technical solutions.

Outcome 1: In FY 16/17 four well-trained team members spent 106 hours on deduping related to the English campaign. One of those employees may not be available for this task next year and a new contractor may help. We still hope to reduce the hours spent.

Objective 2: Enable saving components to use the new backend. Update transaction management facilities to ensure changes to one or more types of content in a page are committed safely in the database and related systems.

MCR sufficiently ready such that the Multimedia and Search Platform teams can start using it to test and prototype things

Objective 2: Advanced search capabilities (e.g., Wikidata Query Service, SPARQL queries) will be updated to support the more specific media search filters and the relationships to the topics they represent.

Begin work on prefix- and full-text search in ElasticSearch on Wikidata in preparation for the Structured Data on Commons project.

Objective 2: Write case studies and documentation for Commons and Wikidata projects that allow project development among Wikimedia Communities and allow us to identify gaps in existing tools.(task T171252)

In early 2017, when the Fundraising Tech team (fr-tech)was developing their FY2017-18 annual plan, they were discouraged from including any kind of program related to the actual raising of funds. Since then, as an organization, we have decided to try to capture more of our work in the form of quarterly goals within programs.

Fr-tech works closely with Advancement to raise the target budget each year. Their first priority is the maintenance of current systems and the support of live activities and campaigns for Advancement. At least 50% of the budget is raised in Q2 (Oct-Dec) each year. The following work is not expressly called out in the annual plan but is essential to the funding of this organization. The table is structured as if there were a program in the annual plan.

(Faux) Annual plan outcome

(Faux) Annual plan objective(s)

Quarterly Work (or Goal)

Primary Team(s)

Dependencies

Tech Goal

ETA

Status

Outcome 1: Advancement and fr-tech raise the target budget amount for the year

Conduct a successful English fundraising campaign

Support the English Campaign:

Maintain all live systems as best as possible through the English Campaign

Please note that virtually all activities in fr-tech are for fundraising purposes, and are budgeted as fundraising (and not as "programs") in the non-profit accounting format. Anything labeled as an fr-tech project or programs is budgeted as non-programmatic work.